The Universe a Vast Electric Organism

by Geo. W. Warder

I am glad to welcome so able a champion of the electrical theory as Mr. Cope Whitehouse, who achieved fame by discovering that the depression in the Egyptian desert could be used for irrigation, and which the English Government is now utilizing.

This New York scientist says, in an interview in the Kansas City Star of Dec. 2d, 1902: "The English scientists have partially reduced our solar system to a machine, and assigned to Deity little less than the duty of squeezing heat from the sun or stoking it with aerolites. Such theories are made for sale and not for science. When Newton suggested that gravity might swing the moon as well as attract an apple to the ground, he knew nothing of electricity. He might have observed however, that a comet never enters the sun and therefore could not have been attracted by it.

"A comet, as it closely approaches its supposed goal, changes its direction and darts away, tail foremost, in a curved path due to a resistance too feeble to obstruct its passage. No allowance is made for the attraction of gravitation in wireless telegraphy, and the most superficial observations in ozology, or the science of smell, show that there is a force in odors which ignores gravitation.

"We have reason for supposing that gravitation is a purely local affair, and heat and light do not emanate from the sun. Heat comes from the earth, and the light from the atmosphere, precisely as the film in an incandescent lamp is heated by the resistance it offers to the electric current, and light is produced by the vibration of the motes in the air."

"The only fact established beyond doubt regarding the sun and planets is their revolution on their axes, and this is all that is needed to generate light and heat. They are arc dynamos and each in turn transmits what it receives to its neighbors on the circuit." This accords with my theory published five years previously. He continues: "We do not see the stars, nor even the sun.

"The astronomer who claims that his eye penetrates space billions, trillions and decillions of miles stultifies himself in the next breath by declaring that worlds and solar systems are being formed of cosmic dust. Was the polestar ever obscured by the interposition of a world in formation? Yet the film formed by the breath of the observer on the eyepiece of a telescope would obscure Jupiter. Evidently, therefore, we no more see a star than we see a distant power house that supplies electricity to trolley lines. We only see the end of the stellar or solar ray where it enters the bubble of which the earth is the center.

"It is strange that no astronomer has ever heretofore observed that the magnifying power of a lens, two inches in diameter could have no appreciable effect on an object as remote as Saturn. Yet the ring and the satellites of this planet are thus made visible. In short, there is a kind of screen which presents the image of stars, as on a sheet between the observer and the magic lantern at an exhibition. The image can be magnified but their distance is perhaps scarcely fifty inches."

In regard to the eruptions of Mont Pelée he says: "Within twenty miles of the earth there is a cold as intense as liquid air. Differences of temperature can be converted into an electric flash, as electricity can be converted into heat. The so-called eruption of Mont Pelée was purely electrical. The sympathetic eruption of La Soufrière was partly due to an interrupted circuit and partly an induced current. There was no flow of lava, but can any one imagine the crater discharging what was said to have issued from it?... When there is an accurate statement of facts it will be found that neither dust nor gas came from the volcano. Really, only mud, hot water, smoke and stones were ejected. This material descended as a thin covering of uniform thickness. And this blanket was the dust precipitated by the electrical vibration still warm from crystallization. Had it been otherwise there would have been about one hundred million tons of frozen mud falling in the neighborhood.

"What Père Mary saw was the cloud of decomposed matter caused by the electric discharges. It is as absurd to speak of all this coming out of the volcano as it would be to say that the smoke and stifling gases in a fire caused by an electric wire came from the power house. As a fuse burned out in the circuit, Pelée simply sparked.

"It set fire to everything between its summit and the sea, and the surface of the water itself was made warm. Now you see how mastodons are found, with hair and flesh intact, imbedded in Siberian ice. If the uprush of an air current would disturb the cold stratum above a chimney, what would be the effect of the upheaval of a mountain mass with or without a volcano? It is unnecessary to suppose that the axis of the earth has changed.